His Own Image | Pastor David Kalamen | November 1, 2020

Just want to welcome you today to uh Christian Center and our branch work out in uh Lake Country, as well as some of our global friends and church acquaintances uh around the around the globe.

We're very happy to be with you today and hope that you and your family are doing well.

Over the last month, uh the pastoral staff have been talking a great deal about uh being made in the image of God and what that actually constitutes and how it applies to us practically.

Our identity, now that we're in Christ, I believe is probably one of the most important themes that the body of Christ is going to have to address in the 21st century church.

Uh some of us can go back a little ways and we can remember what it was to grapple with an identity crisis as a young person growing up.

I think it was Eric, uh the psychologist Eric Erickson that coined that phrase, an identity crisis, which essentially meant that people were trying to find themselves in the midst of growing up.

And you can experience that at many different stages of your life.

Whether you're young or old, uh a woman or a man, it doesn't, it doesn't matter.

We're all go through processes where we are challenged in terms of who we are at this stage in our life.

Uh but that personal challenge that we've had with an identity crisis is actually morphed uh into uh a national phenomenon.

And uh that that phenomena uh we've called uh identity politics, and some of you are aware of that phrase because it's bantered around a lot, but essentially it's the tendency of people to identify uh particularly with a racial, religious, ethnical, social, or even cultural identity, and to do so exclusively of everyone else.

Well, we're encountering that within our culture today, and it seems like trying to locate a sense of personal and corporate identity is probably one of the most uh difficult challenges that people are facing.

Well, Paul wrote about this.

This is something that was written years ago, but he wrote about it uh to the Church of Colos, who at the time was uh facing very similar things in the culture there as we are today, and he said, As you have received Jesus Christ as your Lord, walk in union with him, reflecting his character in the things that you do and say, living your lives in a way that leads others away from sin, and have your life deeply rooted into him, and be continually built up in him.

That's the amplified version uh expression of that, but there's a uh the uh the message translation says it this way you've received Christ Jesus now, live in him.

You're deeply rooted into him, you're well constructed upon him, you know your way around the faith now.

Now do what you've been taught, schools out, quit studying the subject, and start living it out every day.

Well, that's what we're talking about in this series of beginning to understand who we are in Christ and uh and how to live that out on a day-to-day basis, and to be building ourselves up in reference to the revelation the Word of God brings about that.

The essence that uh of what Paul was saying, because we we too live in a very convoluted and complicated culture today, was to say to God's people uh get back to a clear understanding of what transpired on your behalf at Calvary and when you became a Christian.

They've you found your father again.

Uh you've come home, you're plugged into a uh a heavenly DNA.

Uh this you need to be confident about whose you are and who you are now in Christ.

Well, that idea of whose you are and who you are is an idea that has been challenged by the enemy of our faith, uh Satan himself for many, many years.

He's messed around with that idea.

And we know that ideas are powerful, and I think it was Napoleon that made the statement he said that ideas are more powerful than the greatest army, because they have a tendency to live beyond the scope of an army.

Our adversary has been coming against the whole concept of the image of God in man from the get-go.

The Bible says that Jesus Christ is spoken of as the exact living image, the essential manifestation of the unseen God, the visible representation of the invisible.

That's Jesus Christ, God's Son.

Satan, we know, is antichrist, and his fight is against anyone that is now created in the image of God or recreated in the image of Jesus Christ.

That's why I think Christianity and Christians as a whole have come under some realm of attack in regards to the issue of identity within our culture.

The enemy's aim is to attack that image and to cut the roots of our being away from Jesus Christ, to deconstruct the image of God in man.

And there's a way he's done that.

When we look back historically, uh there's strategy to it.

Uh he's he's come into our cultural context by challenging to replace the idea of a creator God and to replace it with an evolver within nature.

Uh we know it as evolution.

If he could discredit and remove the ideas of a supernatural creator and replace it with the ideas of natural evolution, he could undercut the identity and the value of humanity.

Humanity would be forced to self-identify.

Now, Cambridge talks about self-identifying as believing that you're a particular kind of person, especially when other people do not think you are that kind of person.

So self-identity is the only option that we have when we reject the fact that God created us.

The concept of this self-identity and the battle over identity has moved in one generation from I am who God says I am because he created me to I am who I think and say that I am because I essentially create myself and am the master of my own destiny.

The idea of self-identifying has infected an entire generation, as they have been raised upon the ideas of evolution.

And probably the greatest expression of this idea, gone wild, what happened in 1973 when the U.S.

Supreme Court, and again it's in the news today, but when the U.S.

Supreme Court passed a decision on Roe versus Wade.

That became a landmark decision, but it was a tipping point in culture because they made the statement that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion.

Now that's what everybody reads about Roe versus Wade.

But you've got to go to the fine print.

And some of the prime print behind it, the hiddenness of that fine print, is much more devastating to a culture than the actual decision regarding abortion.

There's a statement made in the ruling in the fine print that even though the baby in the womb is human, it is not a person.

Let me say that again.

They made the ruling that even though the baby in the womb was human, it was not a person.

And it created in a new category of person called the human non-person, what has been commonly wrapped into a term that many understand as the personhood theory.

The question of when does a human become a person is an ongoing debate.

Prior to that, there was no debate.

But since that situation, there has been a debate.

Some, of course, believe that life begins at conception.

Others are trying to protect it in terms of the heartbeat rule.

But there are some universities that are actually bringing it to the surface of talking about, well, if a child is not a baby in the womb is not a person in the womb, though human, when does it actually become a person?

Well, it's possible we have to define when that child becomes a person.

And some are actually thinking of it as post-birth, meaning when does the child, even after birth, become a person and validate it being protected in terms of its human rights.

So the idea has moved very quickly in our culture from abortion, and we've seen the issues of euthanasia, uh, but but actually infanticide is something on the books today.

And uh eugenics, uh the the idea of selecting births and valuing one person's right to be here over another person, or that life is is accruing in its value and not as it is not inherent in terms of its value, as God says.

Well, I know there was a lot to package, but I really wanted to bring that out in reference to this identity movement that is going on within our culture.

A quick reading of Romans chapter 1, which I won't get through it, but if you have time, read verses 18 to 31.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

It describes what happens to a culture that rejects a creator God.

People lose their personal sense of identity, they become confused about who they are, and then they wind up competing and comparing themselves with others as the only way of establishing their own personal value or worth.

We call it self-esteem or self-worth, but you're seeing it today, and you know, I'm not a great Facebook or Instagram user.

Um I know it's I know it's very commonly done uh through with many people, and we have a chance to, you know, I've got a lot of friends, so I go on and take a look and see.

But it breaks my heart sometimes, especially when I look at how young women are talking about themselves and the tremendous pressure they seem to be under to try and uh create a sense of personal value by competing and comparing and uh and pushing what I would call the the boundaries in reference to uh having an understanding of of what it means to be uh be accepted and loved for just who they are.

The the creed or identity is a critically important factor to our Christian life.

Paul uh spoke numerous times about not allowing the world to press you into a mold of its own making.

And he he said you need to guard yourself that you do not take cap be are you're not taken captive by ideas and philosophies that devalue you and lie to you about your true identity.

And those things that would uproot you from that true identity that can, I believe, can only be found in Christ and our creator.

Uh we said uh set against that Romans 1 outlook and uh devolving uh culture is a creator culture that's God's people uh need to imbibe and flourish in.

That creator culture establishes our identity on a number of uh very critically important principles.

So I'm gonna just name four with you today and uh lay that out before you to be an encouragement, hopefully, uh, to your walk with God.

Um this creator God, Heavenly Father, Father of Jesus Christ, created you in the womb.

Psalm 139, verse 13 says, You formed my innermost parts.

Psalms 139:13

You knit me together in my mother's womb.

In other words, you were known by God before you were known by anyone else.

You were loved and accepted and approved and delighted in God before anyone else welcomed you into this world.

As a matter of fact, Ephesians talks of chapter 1, verse 4 says, He chose us in Christ, actually selected you for himself as his very own before the foundation of the world.

In other words, you were the primary creation in his heart before the world itself was created.

And he was thinking about who you became and planning the rest of your life.

Every day of your life was in his heart before you ever lived one day.

Now, I know a little bit like that about that as a father.

I remember when I was expecting our first child, our firstborn, and found out it was going to be a little boy.

I went out and got him a baseball uh mitt, and I got him a t-shirt, and I think it took him three years to be able to uh actually grow into the t-shirt that I got him.

But I had all kinds of ideas of fishing and playing baseball and doing all kinds of things with him.

I was already planning that in my heart.

Now I'm a I'm I'm a natural father, but think about Heavenly Father.

Think about what was in his heart for you and for me in reference to our life.

And so when I think of that and I realize that he chose me in Christ before the foundations of the world, um, why would I choose evolution, that I'm here by chance and not by the choice of God over that?

That's what brings esteem and value and a sense of identity to me.

I'm not a mistake of nature.

I was meant to be.

I was chosen to be in this generation.

And uh that's exciting to me.

Uh, and yet I believe an entire generation has been robbed of their identity and their value because they've they've been taught that God was not the creator.

A second point that's in my heart is that uh, you know, creators determine value and worth.

And I've used this before at times in the past, but I want to do it again.

I've got a I've got a$50 bill here.

It's the Canadian uh government that defines the difference between this and a 20 and a 10 and a 5 or a hundred.

Um there's no essential difference in reference to uh the quality of uh of the paper or how it's put together.

They're all the same size, have a little different color.

Uh nothing makes it more special than the other, except for one thing.

The government of Canada has determined that this bill is worth$50.

Now I can do a lot of things to this.

I could rip it, it's a little hard to rip, but I and I'm not going to, but I could rip it, I could crumble it, I it could be dirty, it could be, it could be in many ways uh disrespected and abused, but I could still go into the store and it would not lose its$50 value.

And if I even if it was crumbled up and everything like that, I'm sure the the people here that are filming me today, if I said, Do you still want it after it's all messed up?

They would still say, Yes, we want it.

I know that for sure.

So the the issue at at stake here is that, you know, when God created us, it is God that placed upon us our value.

I don't have to self-value.

I don't have to through uh other efforts of comparison and competition trying to find my self-worth.

I know my value.

That value, God says in his word, was defined by one act, and that was in the sending of his son, Jesus Christ.

When God sent his son, he sent him to die in exchange for my life.

Now, what greater love, the Bible says, of a man giving his life for another, but it he left everything, came to humanity with the love of the Father in his heart, died a very, very difficult death on the cross, and whether there was anyone else that actually believed in him, and if I was the only one, he would have still done it.

Because my value, if you give us Jesus, the Bible says, will he uh hold back any other good thing from us?

Uh he gave us his most precious possession in his son in exchange for my life.

That value on my life is absolutely immense.

Um and so I don't live to try and get my value or my identity from identifying with those around me.

I get, I live to get my sense of identity and value from an audience of one, from the individual who actually created me.

And if I want to know my value, I don't go to other people who have all kinds of opinions about my value.

I go to God who has established my value, and I believe my creator.

That's important.

We are the apple of his eye.

And everything that he's done, as we read in scripture, was done for me.

In that way, I am the center of his attention.

Uh, he's obsessed with my life.

Now we've we've talked about this in the past at some length and talked about this dual attention that's there.

From my perspective, it's all about God.

It's all about Jesus and what he's done.

But from the Father's perspective, it was all about me.

He didn't need uh, you know, he didn't need to come for himself and die on a cross.

He did it for me.

It was all about me.

And as I read the Word of God, I see the inestimatable uh value that he has placed upon my life.

And Psalm 139, if you have a chance to read that at some point, I wish I could scroll it behind me and show this to you.

But God's actually obsessed with you.

The Bible says that when you wake up, he's there.

When you try to hide from him, you can't get away from him.

Uh his thoughts are constantly directed at you.

And wherever you go, he's going with you.

His heart is towards you.

He knows your thoughts before you think them.

He knows the words that are being formed in your mouth before you say them.

And the Bible makes it so, so very clear that I'm important to God.

Uh from morning till night, from my earliest days to my latest days, Psalm 139 makes it clear I don't have to get anyone else's approval or a sense of value and identity from them.

I get it from Him alone.

I can just focus on being the best me that God created me to be.

So believing that there's a creator and believing that when a creator creates, that he establishes the value, not society, not your friends, not your mom and dad, uh, not those who hate you, it's God who establishes your value and your identity.

Uh you belong to him.

You're a child of the king, you're a prince and princess of the kingdom.

Uh it's important that you get this into your heart.

That's important.

God created you, knows you from the womb.

He's determined your value and worth.

But also he creates your identity.

See, I identity in the world is based on what I can what I can do or what I'm known uh for.

Uh but in Christ, our identity is based upon whether God knows you.

Whose are you?

Not who you are.

And it's a both and, but it's really critically important.

Now you you see that in human life.

You've known of people who have been adopted or given away as a child to another family, and they've been taken care of well in that family, but there's something of an ache in the soul of these individual people that say, I really want to know my birth mom and dad.

I want to know them.

Why is there such a cry that way?

Well, the cry is there because they want to know who created them.

They want to get back to the root of roots of roots.

And so we understand that it's God who has created us.

He's established our identity.

And so my identity is going to be found not in just the Calaman name and knowing my father and mother, but my identity as a Christian is going to be found in the name of God and in my relationship to Heavenly Father.

It's knowing God now that is the most important thing in my life.

It's what Paul said, and my determined purpose in life is that I might know him.

I need to know him.

Because he created me with intention and purpose and design.

And it's vitally important.

My life is hid with Christ in God, the Bible says.

So we can find out who we've been designed by God to be.

We can do whatever He empowers us to do, and we can become by His grace everything He has created and decreed and destined us to become.

That's really important.

Now, why would I exchange that thinking and that idea for a culture that is now caught up having lost its sense of identity because it's no longer a created being, and now I have to find my own way through this process and in that in that journey of trying to find myself realize that I may be walking down the entirely a road that is not healthy for my life and creating all kinds of identities in me that don't match who God created me to be.

So it's important as a Christian, when we gave our life to Christ, to get our identity rooted into Him and to have our lives constructed upon what God says we are, and who God says we are, and what God says we can do, what God says where God says we're going.

You know, those are the four basic questions of every generation.

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What am I supposed to do?

Where am I going?

They're all answered in a belief in a God who created you and I.

That's important.

And of course, this is being fought in our culture, and a generation is suffering as a result of it, and the loss of that idea.

Of course, there's the fourth point is that God created us with purpose and intention and destiny.

All of life has been designed with purpose and destiny.

All of life.

If you look at all of created uh the created uh or all of creation, you will see the stamp of God's purpose and intention resting upon everything.

So when it comes to humanity, the highest of his creation, sons and daughters, um what about us?

Have we been, as the rest of the world, including the planets, know their orbits?

Uh, you know, there's cycles and seasons.

All of those things are very clear in life.

When it comes to humanity, the top of the creation of God, um, I find it very difficult to believe that God would create us without a sense of understanding about purpose and destiny.

And this is what God says.

He says in Jeremiah 29, 11, I know the plans and the thoughts that I have for you.

Plans for peace and well-being and not for disaster to give you a future and a hope.

That's a wonderful passage of scripture.

I know it was spoken to a nation at that time, but it's backed up all the way through scripture that God thinks about that with you.

If God created you, he knows the plans and the thoughts he has for you.

And so if we want to know the plans and thoughts he has for us, we have to get to know God.

So it draws us back to God.

God wants us to know.

It's not just predestined on our life and we live our life as a robot.

That's not how God's done it.

He's built us for relationship.

And if we want to know who we are and what we can do and where we're going, we can get into relationship with him, and God will instruct us and give us an understanding of his will, and we can be maximized in this life.

He goes on in Ephesians 2.10 and says, For we are his workmanship.

We're the master's work, a work of art, a tapestry tree that God is weaving and threading all of the experiences of our life into them so that at the end it shows something off that's beautiful.

He says, uh, we're created in Christ Jesus, reborn from above, spiritually transformed, renewed, ready to be used for good works, which God prepared for us beforehand, so that we could walk in them.

So these things were prearranged for us.

God had a plan for us, that if you actually give your life to Him and ask Him, God, what's your plan?

What do you have for my life?

God's will is not that hard to locate.

God will reveal it.

Well, what saddens me is that an entire generation has been placed in confusion as to their real identity by the attempts of our adversary, the devil, to kill the idea of a creator.

And as humanity has adopted that idea, they've also had their identity stolen.

When we talk about identity theft, everybody knows that phrase, and maybe many of you have experienced it in some way.

Well, you can take a person's stuff and get it back and replace it, but when you take their soul, that's a totally different thing.

And God warns you in Scripture.

He says, listen, don't fear the one that can take your possessions from you, but you better fear the one who knows how to take your soul and destroy it.

Well, the soul of this generation uh is at stake because its identity has been stolen by an idea that has been bought into by a generation, and they've lost their identity with Heavenly Father, who demonstrated who he was in the life of his son.

The disciples asked Jesus in his day, show us the Father, show us what he's like.

He said, Well, if I have I've been with you for a while now, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

Well, that's what it means to be a Christian.

It means to be connected to what Jesus has actually portraying about the Father and to become like Jesus and allow Christ in us as a Christian to live out that Christian life.

And so that the relationship that Jesus had with the Father, we too can have with the Father, and we can be reconciled to his purposes.

You can know your Creator.

You can come home to your Heavenly Father.

You can reconnect with the lover of your soul.

You can get rooted into a divine DNA and an identity that will hold you steady all the course of your life.

You can know whose you are and the one who will fight for you, your life, your health, uh, your success in life, your destiny, a fulfilling of the dreams that God puts in your heart.

You can find out why you were born and what you're to do.

You can do it with security, knowing that you're accepted and you're loved and you're supported and you're being rooted for from heaven.

All of heaven is applauding you and rooting for your success.

We are not here by chance.

We are here by the choice of God.

Now, if you're in Christ, don't allow the spirit of the world to rob you and disconnect you from your spiritual roots in Christ, your identity in Christ, your DNA, your heritage in God.

And let God reconstruct you to make you what He's called you to be.

Sometimes we just do our own thing, and we know sometimes doing our own thing gets us the wrong thing, and we find ourselves in the wrong place.

But there's a way when we come back to God and we say, God, uh, we really want to know you because I don't want to walk through the rest of a course of my life not knowing myself.

You know me the best.

Talk to me about who I am and who you created me to be, and then help me to fulfill my destiny.

Klaus said it this way, as I read it before.

You received Christ Jesus.

Now live him.

Live him out.

Let Christ be lived in and through your life magnificently.

The more you get to know God, the more you're gonna get to know yourself.

The closer you get to God, the closer you're gonna be to knowing who you are.

You're deeply rooted in him, Paul says.

You're well constructed upon him, you know your way around the faith.

Now do what you've been taught.

School's out, quit studying, and start living Jesus out in your life and adopt the identity that the Word of God establishes for your life.

You need to know this today.

Absolutely.

Whether you're a Christian listening or not a Christian listening, whether you've accepted God as your the creative entity in your life, or whether you've decided I'm going to create my own life, my own, do my own thing my own way.

You need to know this, that you're loved and you were chosen in Christ before the foundations of the world.

That He formed you and your substance and put you together in the womb.

That's very intimate.

That's not a production venue where you're putting a car together.

He intimately formed you in the womb because of relationship.

He's called you to himself.

Uh he's blessed you with his nature and life and power.

He's anointed you to be able to accomplish stuff.

He's gifted and empowered you.

He's appointed you to do some unbelievable things and to go on a journey with him in life.

Um he's ordained your life with purpose and intention, and he's waiting for you at the end of it.

There's there's destiny, there's heaven at the very end of it all, and being with him forever.

Well, if you don't know him, you can get to know him.

It's not a hard thing.

You just bow your head and say, God, I'm tired of trying to do it myself and figure myself out.

I'm just gonna go to you.

You created, I'm gonna make this statement of faith that I believe that you created me and that you created me with intention and purpose.

And uh and that if I get to know you, you'll help me understand myself and teach me how I should live.

I'm praying that for that, for you today, and for all of the church, that we would rise up in a day where there's so much identity confusion and literally.